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For over a year, Occupy Democrats has circulated a popular graphic on Facebook arguing that guns should be treated like cars.

This argument in turn has stimulated a very cogent rebuttal by Eugene Volokh as well as a Facebook page by Second Amendment advocates arguing that this actually would be a huge improvement over current federal and state gun control laws which now place far more restrictions on gun owners than do parallel laws governing automobile ownership.

There's no point in rehashing these arguments. There clearly is a critical difference between the regulatory regimes governing guns and autos. Guns tend to be regulated as if they are obviously inherently dangerous and must be carefully controlled (in terms of who is permitted to own them, whether they can be displayed in public, even how they must be stored if children are in the house). In contrast, there seems to be no equivalent presumption about cars whose rules regarding ownership and use seem far less restrictive. That is, virtually anyone (including the mentally ill, past criminals etc.) may own a car and do whatever they want with it on private property. One needs a car license only if driving on public streets.

This puzzles me in light of the available empirical evidence:

There were 310 million guns in the U.S. in 2009 (a Congressional Research Service figure I have no reason to dispute), a figure that likely grew to perhaps 350 million by 2013.

These guns result in ~33,000 deaths in 2013, of which 64% were suicides, leaving ~500 accidental deaths and 11,200 due to homicides (these are official CDC figures reported in Table 10)

These result in ~33,000 deaths a year, roughly half of which are drivers (these are official NHTSA statistics).

In this sharply divided country, there surely is also strong disagreement about the extent to which government ought to be protecting citizens from self-harm. But I presume that a broad spectrum of the public on both sides of the aisle would agree there is an appropriate government role in protecting citizens from being harmed by one another. So if we leave aside self-inflicted deaths, the average car is 1.8 times as risky as the average gun. That is, my owning a car is 80 percent more likely to result in the death of another person than my owning a gun. In light of this simple fact, it is puzzling why gun ownership is so vehemently scorned on the left as somehow being a flagrantly irresponsible act.

But it's actually much worse than this. Fully 96% of non-suicide death rates from firearms are due to homicides (again, derived from Table 10). There is no defender of the Second Amendment who argues that the Constitution accords citizens the freedom to kill one another. Clearly, anyone who uses a firearm for that purpose should be severely punished; moreover, no one could credibly include murderers in the count of "responsible" gun owners. So the rate of "accidental" firearm deaths is astonishingly small: 1.4 deaths per million guns, i.e., less than 2 per day.

Contrast that with cars. About 31% of all vehicle deaths are due to drunk drivers--a group for whom society has little sympathy. Many would be prepared to declare that driving drunk is criminal and that those found guilty of killing someone in an inebriated condition warrant being dealt with severely (this isn't the time or place to delve into the question of whether treatment or punishment is the most appropriate societal response to such incidents). But it also turns out that the drunk drivers themselves constitute 65% of drunk driving deaths. If we remove the non-driver deaths from drunk driving from our count of overall non-driver vehicle accident victims, we end up with a net of about 12,700 non-driver "accidental" deaths a year (36.2 accidental deaths for every million vehicles). In short, the typical car is 25 times as likely to kill someone accidentally as the typical gun.

And yet one progressive proponent of regulating guns like cars, Nicholas Kristof, brags about how safe automobiles are, claiming that regulation of automobiles has reduced fatalities by 95% over the past century to only 1 per million miles of driving. In light of these statistics, it would appear that the average car owner is FAR less responsible than the average gun-owner at ensuring that innocent victims don't die as a consequence of accidents involving this type of property. However, it is Kristof who claims that the nation has a blind spot when it comes to guns, overlooking his own rather flagrant blind spot when it comes to the riskiness of automobile ownership.

So again, in light of these eye-opening but indisputable facts, why is gun ownership so vilified by progressives? They could save literally 25 times as many lives by convincing a single typical car owner to drive more responsibly than convincing a single typical gun owner to use their weapon more responsibly. Instead of derisively sneering at those who "cling to guns" out of bitterness, perhaps they ought to ask themselves why guns rather than cars invite their scorn.

I am recently retired as a Research Scholar at the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University. I also am an Adjunct Scholar at American Enterprise Institute and Mercatus-Affiliated Senior Scholar. Having been trained in policy analysis at the Par...